It Gets Harder! But You Can Handle It
Peace and blessings. Thank you so much for tuning in to The Abundantly Ever After Show.
I’m your host, Jovhannah Tisdale, also known as The Spiritual Love Healer. Today I want to share a little bit of wisdom about the leveling up process or evolving.
A lot of times, we think that things are going to be easier. So in our last days of class, my instructor shared some nuggets of wisdom with us, and I also saw a post on Facebook where the Women’s basketball coach at Duke University was sharing some words of wisdom about leveling up and things not being easy.
One of the things that I can truly attest to is that my life has not been without challenges.
And every time it feels like, you know, I’ve overcome one thing, or I’ve made it through one thing, then it’s like, okay, there’s another, right?
And for people, there’s a lot of talk about how, you know, we manifest things, we bring things into our existence, and yes, that is true.
However, there’s also, it almost gives this air that life is supposed to be without problems, and that is not necessarily true.
So if you feel like, Oh my gosh, like, life is hard, there’s so much going on. That’s kind of how it’s supposed to be.
Things can get easier, but I think the reality is that life does get harder.
And we aren’t always told the truth.
I know for me, it was like, you know, graduate from high school, go to college, get a degree, get a job, boom, that’s it.
Everything else should just fall in line naturally.
That’s not what I experienced, and I struggled with feeling like a failure.
I struggled with dealing with depression and anxiety and all these other challenges from life because I felt like I was doing it wrong.
No one ever told me like, hey, yeah, you can go to school, you can get a degree, but that doesn’t mean everything’s just going to be easy. You’re still going to have challenges in life and so.
I am grateful for everything that I went through for going through depression, dealing with major anxiety, PTSD, because it taught me valuable things about life. I would not wish it on anyone, but I’m grateful for the lessons that I learned because of it.
It’s made me into a better person, a better mother, a better woman. And it allows me to support others as a coach and healer in a more dynamic way, because I know what it’s like to face trauma.
I know what it’s like to go through trauma and to recover from trauma.
Because I’ve lived those things, I can speak to it and hold space for people who are also navigating their own challenges or traumatic issues in their life.
My instructor was telling us that… I recently graduated from massage therapy school. Yay me!!!
I’m so excited and just proud of myself and I will continue to celebrate this accomplishment every day that I take breath into my body because it is monumental.
She was like, alright, like, you did the thing. I’m not here to tell you that it’s going to get easier, because it’s not.
She’s like you. You did one hard thing, right?
You came to school every day.
You made changes in your schedule, you studied.
You passed the exam while dealing with all the things that were happening in your lives, right?
There was a lot going on in my personal life.
I’m sure my classmates had stuff going on in their personal lives.
We did what we needed to do.
We passed the exam that we needed to pass.
That was another hard thing.
We went out and we toured facilities.
We did a interviews and we were placed in amazing jobs and now?
She’s like, yeah, like everything looks shiny and bright, and it feels good, and you should be proud of yourself, But it’s still not going to get easy.
She’s like things are going to get hard and you’re going to second guess yourself.
You’re gonna, you know, make a mistake or you’re going to have that one client that did not like the work that you did.
Be prepared because things don’t get easier.
And she said, In fact, I might say that things get harder.
I just listened, and looked back on my life and the things that I have experienced and things have gotten harder. It reminded me of the days of playing Super Mario Brothers!
You go through level one and you experience those challenges and it’s like, Oh my gosh, it’s hard, but by the time you go through level one, and you’ve played it 1,020, however many times, then you know where every challenge is. You learn some shortcuts, and you know how to beat the boss at the end. Super quick and easy.
Then when you get to that final boss, right, the big boss. That takes a little more finagling and finesse.
How many times did you lose in that video game trying to beat. I can’t even think… King what was his name? I can see his face, but I cannot think of its name.
But yeah, how many times did you lose before finally beating that boss?
So the next time you lose, but every time you went through it and lost you learned something else.
You learned a new strategy.
Like, Oh well, if I do this or if I stay on this side of the bridge.
I know the bridge is gonna close.
I don’t wanna fall in the lava.
So if I stay on this side of the bridge and then jump, then boom, I won’t lose a life there and I can attack this way.
So you learn things as you, even in your failures, even in the hard situations where maybe you don’t succeed, you still learn something that’s going to help you so you can come back and then win.
When you finally got all your lives, you got extra mushrooms or whatever little tools and helpers that you need, you can go in, and you have a better strategy because you’ve done it before.
Maybe you weren’t successful, but you’ve done it before.
You’ve learned a lot of things that helped you handle hard better, and so going back to what I mentioned at the start where the coach was telling the players, she’s basically saying something similar, it’s not going to get easy, don’t wait for easy because it’s not coming.
And what she said was you have to become a person that handles hard better and that just really sat with me.
Check out her speech:
And because of the challenges that I’ve went through, I have learned how to handle hard, better certain things that would take other people out.
I’m just like, oh, OK. I’m not desensitized to it, it still affects me. But I know how to handle it better because I’ve experienced hard things, so that the harder things that I’ve experienced in life help me to deal with the regular challenges better.
Then when super hard situations come along, like dealing with a miscarriage or dealing with losing a relationship, and things that kind of rock you to your core, you can handle them a little bit differently.
It didn’t take me weeks, months, or years to recover mentally, emotionally, or physically from those situations because I was able to handle those hard situations better because of the way that I have grown in my life.
I do a lot of personal development work, I do a lot of spiritual work, and I’m always seeking to grow and develop and to become a better person.
And when we do that, we develop the ability to be proactive versus being reactive and allowing shit to happen and just watching where the cards fall and then trying to pick up the pieces.
You move a little bit differently when you have gained knowledge and skills that will help you handle the challenges in your life differently.
You have more wisdom, a better perspective, maybe even different people in your life who can guide you or share their own wisdom or their experiences that help you look at things differently.
Rather than just being someone that says I can’t, this is too hard, I’ll just sit this one out.
I imagine if all the things that I was going through while I was in massage school or even the things that could have prevented me from enrolling. What if I had just said, you know what, this is too hard. This is too much.
It’s going to take too much for me to do this.
I don’t know how I’m going to do it.
My schedule is too busy.
I could have come up with 1,001 excuses.
And I would not be where I am right now. I would not be who I am right now.
If I had not said, OK, I can do this, I will just deal with whatever comes up.
And sometimes as a single mom that looks like I’m not going to do laundry today, I’m going to go to bed early, or I’m going to skip doing this so that I can study.
It looks differently, and sometimes it doesn’t look pretty.
I think that we have all been done a grave disservice because we’ve all watched these movies with these shows where everything is just perfect, right?
Everything is perfect.
The house is always clean.
The busy working mom always seems to have it together.
That’s not real life.
Every single day real life.
No, there are some days when everything is all the way together.
And then there are days when I’m just like, listen.
I just need a minute, right?
Everything does not have to be perfect.
And even in those moments when they are, appreciate that and celebrate that.
But know that when things are not perfect you did not do anything wrong.
And I think that’s one of the main things that I took away from my instructor and this basketball coach was that things will always be hard.
There will always be some challenge, some sort of adversarial energy, whether it’s and it might sometimes just be your mindset, right? Sometimes it’s not someone outside of us.
Sometimes we’re at war with ourselves, battling our inner thoughts, battling habits that keep us stuck or self sabotaging.
Know that it’s not always something that you did to attract some sort of bad experience.
Sometimes that’s just how things go in life.
We have our good moments.
It’s like the Wheel of Fortune in Tarot.
The wheel spins and sometimes luck is in your favor. Luck is with you. And sometimes the wheel spins, and it’s no longer there, and you’re dealing with your challenges.
That’s one of the things that I really love about tarot.
Is that it truly does reflect every step in our journey and life and the tower card, which is like the card of upheaval, of changes, and sometimes these are like super drastic changes!
On most cards it’s shows a tall building, a tower and a lightning bolt hitting it.
Not fun, but that happens in life.
A car accident very reminiscent of the Tower card. You can just be driving along, everything’s great, and you get into a car accident.
And so now there’s this whole other set of circumstances on top of all the things that you normally, you know, deal with or go through that you have to now deal with.
That doesn’t mean that you just upand say screw it, I’m just not going to deal with this. Or you take off, and don’t handle things appropriately.
It’s just saying, okay, this thing happened, what’s the best way for me to move through this now?
And if I don’t know how to do it, that’s okay. Who can I contact that can help me through it? Maybe it’s a lawyer, maybe it’s your parent, maybe it’s a friend.
There’s a plethora of ways to navigate a situation!
Becoming a person that handles hard better, I really love that.
It doesn’t mean that you’re handling it by yourself. So I’m going to say that one more time.
Becoming a person that handles hard better. Does not mean that you are handling it by yourself.
A lot of the challenges that I faced when I was coming out of are dealing with an abusive relationship and then subsequently coming out of it, going through the healing process, navigating depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder from that relationship.
I had to go through that by myself because the people around me, they were not helping me to be a person that handled hard better.
So I had to cultivate that within myself.
I had to lean on other resources, support groups, therapy and things of that nature to help hold me together, to help me bring those pieces of myself back and so you don’t have to go through it alone.
And that’s one of the things that I’m really big on is community, making sure that you have a good circle of people around you because I was in a situation where I did not have that and it was very detrimental.
Very detrimental and I don’t think that I would be here today had I not found that inner light within myself and connected with the wisdom that I have to get away from this environment.
I have to cut off contact with these people because they are damaging my already fragile mental state.
And so me being able to do the hard thing and move myself into a healthier situation where I could take the time to truly heal and find inner peace and wholeness and love within myself is what allowed me to then move forward and handle all the other hardship that was going on and that continues to go on in life.
So I just thought that those were two really beautiful lessons on wisdom on handling challenges that may come up in life and also speaking to the fact that life is hard!
When we can be honest about it and say that Things are hard.
There are people who every Instagram post looks like life is just fluffy and fun and it’s all rainbow and glitter and there are no problems because I’m living my best life.
There are still challenges, and maybe your favorite instagrammer is not sharing the shit that happens behind the scenes. But believe me, they’re experiencing some challenges too.
They might just be different challenges, but they are experiencing some challenges.
Challenges help us to grow if we can shift our perspective and see them as catalysts for growth and transformation.
And it’s interesting because we’re about to head into Scorpio season and a lot of this feels very scorpionic talking about dealing with heavy things and you know not shying away from these things, looking at the shadow aspects, dealing with transformation.
And I just think it’s, it’s so, so telling when we’re able to really bring our full sales forward and say yes life is good but or and because we can hold space for both, and I think that’s one of the things that I really try to do, is say that yes, I am living Abundantly Ever After.
I’ve manifested my Spiritual Love. I have retrained my mindset to focus on positive forward movement. I’ve done all of these things and I still go through shit in life.
So it’s not ever that I’m like on a mountain top looking down, trying to tell you who you should be, what you should do, and all of those things.
It’s holding space for both.
Because I’ve been in the trenches, I’ve been in the darkness and then I can also stand in the light.
So it’s a beautiful way of being real and to speaking to what is happening in not only in our lives, but in the world in general, right?
There’s so much going on. And to just pretend or ignore some of the…. I don’t wanna say that.
And to just to ignore some of the harsh realities that are happening in the world and thinking like everything is just super easy should be fun.
It’s that’s just not how things are. And I was thinking about that as I was super doe eyed and I’m ready to start my career in massage and reopen my business.
And then my instructor was like, you know, things are going to be hard.
And in the back of my head, I’m like, no, it should be fine. I know what I’m doing.
I’ve got this amazing career. I’ve got my business.
It’ll be super amazing to just kind of find a new location and start! No, everything should be easy.
And then I thought about it and I’m like, this is new.
This is new.
Going into this position, into this career is new.
There will be times that I will stumble.
And I’m really thankful that she was like, no, it’s gonna get hard. Before it gets easier, it will get hard.
I just really appreciate when we have, you know, teachers in our lives who can keep it real. I strive to do that because that’s important, to know what it is that we’re facing and what it is that we’re dealing with.
I tell people all the time, once I left that abusive relationship. Things did not get any easier for me.
Things got hard and I don’t know that I was really prepared for that, for the simple fact that I didn’t know, it’s a completely new situation.
I did not know what to expect and I also did not have any guidance in that area of life as well.
So it was just it was hard and I was not prepared for that for sure however, eventually it did get better.
Once we are able to rebuild our foundation.
Once we have a map or a guide to know where we’re going, what we’re looking for.
That is when things shift a little easily easier.
And so having your end goal in mind, knowing what it is that you want to do, who you want to become, what you want to experience, those things can guide you forward.
So while I’m going through massage school and I’m ending relationships, dealing with family things, like just a lot of different stuff going on, right.
What kept me going was the end result. The end result was I wanted to become a licensed massage therapist.
It’s been on my vision board and I was gonna see this thing through.
The end result was knowing how I wanted to serve others with my skills as a massage therapist.
The end result was the business that I’ve always envisioned myself having and being able to offer these services in a more dynamic way.
So I stayed focused on that end result, and that is what helped carry me through.
And in the process I learned how to handle different things.
I learned how to a stay focused and bounce back from adversity and challenges in my personal life and things with school, and studying, and finding time management l, and feeling like I made a lot of sacrifices in order to focus on going to school full time.
Which meant that I wasn’t able to be as present as a parent as I wanted to be because I’m in school and then just doing all of these things, so because I was able to Shift My focus, and stay focused on what it is I want it to accomplish that helped me to navigate the hard things better.
Because if I knew that it was going to throw me off my path, if I knew that it was going to distract me from becoming a licensed massage therapist.
If I knew it was going to distract me from studying, from reaching my goals, from passing my exams.
Then I just I could not allow it in my life any longer. And sometimes that’s the hardest thing to do, is to say no right?
To set up boundaries, to cut off other people’s access to you, or to stop watching your favorite show.
It’s hard to set boundaries for yourself and other people, and again, becoming a person that handles hard better, sometimes it will require that.
It will require you to say no, it will require you to change your habits.
It will require of you things that are hard and when you’re able to do those things, even if it means you need support from a coach, a teacher, someone else who’s been there and who can be of support and who can guide you.
That’s OK. You do not have to do it alone, and I think that is just the most beautiful, beautiful thing to remember.
If there’s anything that you take away from this is that in growing and evolving as a person, you don’t have to do it alone.
And I don’t wish that for anyone.
I think that I was very fortunate in being able to navigate some of the darkest moments of my life alone, but I would not recommend that for anyone.
Even now, I make sure that I have people in my life who I can go to when things get rough. And it’s OK! I cannot hold all of this by myself.
I need help!
Learning to ask for help was really hard for me because I was used to either being the person helping or I was used to not having people there to help me and so I had to learn to ask for help.
And so again, that was another hard thing, but now that I know how to ask for help.
I can do it a lot more easily, and if something comes up that I can’t handle myself, I know how to ask, I know who to ask, and it’s no longer an issue.
I think the more that we handle, the harder challenges in our life better, from the smallest of things to the most grandest of things.
It makes things go smoother for you.
So when the next hard situation comes along, instead of it looking like a boulder, it’s a little pebble.
You’re like, oh, OK, I can pick this up, put it in my pocket.
Versus having to lug around a huge boulder where you are stressing over something day in and day out because you don’t know how to handle it or you feel that you’re not equipped to handle it.
So I think when we become that person who is resilient, who is strong in mind and spirit,
challenges don’t look like boulders anymore.
Maybe they they’re rocks or pebbles.
It’s something that you can pick up and hold in your hand versus you walking around trying to carry a boulder on your back, right?
That is what learning how to deal with conflict does for you. It keeps you from making a mountain out of a molehill.
And it keeps a grain of salt from feeling like a boulder.
So those are my words for you today.
Thank you again for tuning into the Spiritual.
Excuse me thank you again for tuning into the Abundantly Ever After Show.
I am still working on the 2023 Spiritual Love planner.
It is coming along slowly but I know it’s all in good time and I look forward to sharing it with you soon.